Well, someone's in trouble. If a faculty member allowed their name to be put on this thing then that's on them, if they didn't then whoever did the submission h

Well, someone's in trouble. If a faculty member allowed their name to be put on this thing then that's on them, if they didn't then whoever did the submission has to go. Also all the papers of all the co-authors who allowed their name on it are now suspect for me and should be investigated seriously. Sure, if the fact is that they said "don't put my name on stuff that you publish unless I have specifically agreed" or "don't publish this thing, it needs work" and then that message got lost - they are off the hook for me. But there needs to be a look at the culture of the labs involved even in that case. That's brutal because as I say there is a possibility that they are victims of someone going over the top, but unfortunately I think MIT has to do it. In addition, for me there is a much wider ethics issue here. How many papers can really be checked properly by someone claiming authorship even if that author isn't really contributing? I can read a paper like this in about a fortnight because I have a job and a life. A faculty member also has a job and a life - they are doing admin and teaching as well as research. So to me it's impossible for someone to check 25 papers or more a year. I am seeing far higher counts than this by many academics. But, this is an extremely conservative threshold in my opinion. When I have contributed to scientific papers it has taken me at least three months of solid work each time. Often these papers get rejected (rightly) and then have to be substantially amended (or occasionally just abandoned) I am not that talented for sure, but I really find it hard to credit that anyone with an actual job (so not a post-doc or a student) can contribute to more than one academic paper a year. Potentially two or three if there is a confluence of papers getting ready for print... but not on a sustained basis. There are two solutions. Every university and research institute needs to investigate all the publications of academics with high paper counts per year. This is a red flag. I definitely think that if folks are in the top quartile in a department it needs to be looked at carefully. The other solution is that no academic publishing venue (conference or journal) should accept more than one paper per year from any author.